The Deciding Rounds

The Deciding Rounds

In the coming weeks (hopefully starting this week) I will be running a little test. In the previous week Kalindra was in play and I noticed a ridiculous amounts of games where I knew I had the game won or lost after the 1st round.

I will be be tracking the following stats from my games:
Games played
number of games decided prior to playing a single round
number of games decided after the 1st round
number of games decided after 2 rounds
number of games that was determined on the outcome of round 3

Nope. i only count locked up 100% wins. nothing is more frustrating than waiting to see how round 2 and round 3 is played as my opponent thinks about the move when the match is over - either i have no chance or they dont have a chance --- at least on my end i can quit

Out of curiousity, for the motana/bangers deck... what were ssome examples of round 0 victories? Like you said, the deck doesn't offer large life gaps; so were these cases of inexperienced opponents having unusable decks?

if the opponent is inexperienced or not... if i see the win is there i count it as game has been decided. Im sure i missed one or two games where i had the win locked up or the opponent had the game locked up.

@jeber: We're talking about ELO here, completely hopeless opponents are a bit of a rare sight. It's probably due to the opponent drawing his worst possible hand or a bad split that simply couldn't score enough damage to win. Keep in mind that Graff and Spiaghi can rob your opponent of a pretty significant amount of gap.

@waster: If your hypothesis for that week turns out to be correct, what would that mean to you as a player? Your original reason for this experiment was that you felt too many games are decided in Round 1. Would it change your feelings regarding ELO if you can establish that the ratio of 1st turn wins or losses is more determined by one's deck than any other factor (bans/unbans etc?)

This is why Freaks are so much better than they appear on paper. Yes, their bonus is worthless in later rounds. But they have the most valuable characters on turn 1 and/ or turn 2. No other clan can have a character with 8 power + pill manipulation + poison (Grudj and Baldovino) and this is the strongest combination for a turn 1 character. This is why I've always ranked Grudj slightly higher than Bogdan- SOA is mighty but it is least useful on turn 1 and really so much more powerful on turns 3 and 4. The best Freaks are optimized for turn 1 and/ or turn 2, and they should also be paired with a different clan optimized for turns 3 and 4.

Simply put, Freaks have some of the best characters in the rounds that most matter most of the time.